Russia under the Old regime

194

If the crown tightly controlled trade, it may be said to have held Russia's manufacturing industry in exclusive ownership. Apart from iron, salt and coarse cloth, all produced by very primitive domestic methods, Muscovite Russia had no indigenous industries. Its first industrial establishments were founded in the seventeenth centuries by foreigners who had come to Russia with tsarist permission and worked under state licence. Thus, the foundries at Tula and Kashira, from which developed the Russian iron industry, were the creation of Dutch and German mining experts, Andries Winius (Vinius) and Peter Marselis, who in 1632 undertook to furnish the government with weapons. Marselis also laid the foundations of Russia's copper industry. Paper and glass manufactures were founded by Swedes. The Dutch erected in Moscow the first woollen mill. These and other enterprises to which Russia's industry owed its rise were sponsored by the crown, financed by a combination of tsarist and foreign capital and directed by foreign experts. They worked exclusively for the monarchy to which they sold, at cost, whatever share of the production it required. Their profit came from the sale on the open market of the surplus. Although the Muscovite government insisted on foreign licensees training Russians in their arts, the management as well as skilled labour employed in these early establishments came almost exclusively from abroad. Native capital and managerial personnel were as conspicuous by their absence as they would have been in any western colonial dependency.

The monarchy lacked an administration to supervise its commercial activities and such promysly as salt manufacture and fisheries which were dispersed throughout the empire. It therefore made frequent use of the practice of farming out those branches of business on which it claimed a monopoly to individuals on the understanding that from the proceeds they would turn over to the Treasury a fixed annual sum. The surest way of becoming rich in Muscovite Russia was to obtain a concession of this sort. The Stroganovs, peasants who became the richest merchant family of Muscovy, owed their start to a licence to manufacture salt in conquered Novgorod. From this beginning, they gradually branched out into other profitable enterprises, but always operating either under state licence or in partnership with the state.

To supervise the business activities in which it participated directly, the crown relied on experts drawn from the ranks of native and foreign merchants. The highest echelon of such state-employed businessmen were the Moscow gosti, an elite which in the middle of the seventeenth century numbered some thirty persons. Gost' was an ancient word, derived from the same root as gosudar' (p. 77). Originally it designated all foreign merchants, but, like the term 'boyar', from the end of the sixteenth century it became an honorific title bestowed by the tsar. To qualify fcr it, a merchant had to have large capital, because the tsar often exated from gosti deposits which were used to make good any arrears. Ii terms of relative wealth, the Moscow gosti came close to the urban paricians of the west, and in the historical literature they are sometime compared to them, but the analogy is difficult to sustain. Gosti wee not free entrepreneurs; they were royal factors, appointed by the tsar aid working for him. In fact, few ever requested the honour; more ofta than not, they were dragooned. As soon as it came to the attentionof the government that a provincial merchant had accumulated a fortune, he was ordered to move to Moscow and appointed a gost. Th"status was more of an onerous burden than a distinction because of tie risks involved in having part of one's capital tied up as collateral. Firthermore, gosti competed with one another not for goods and customer, but for royal favours, and the income they made was compensator for the services rendered the tsar. Just below gosti, in terms of social staus and economic power, were members of commercial bodies called 'hundreds', namely the gostinaia and sukonnaia sotni.

Gosti ind persons enrolled in these two 'hundreds' performed the most divrse functions; they collected customs and liquor duties, appraisec the goods which the tsar had an interest in buying, sold them on his acount, supervised some manufactures and minted money. They constitutd a kind of pool of businessmen whose members the monarchy in characteristic fashion never allowed to specialize because it did not wish to bcome overly dependent on them. They made their profits on handlinggovernment goods as well as on their private undertakings. In legal thory, gosti belonged with the tiaglo-bearing population; but thanks tcprivileges, confirmed in personal charters, they were peers of the noblet servitors. The most valuable of these privileges were exemptions fron tariffs and taxes, and immunities from the detested voevoda courts; fireign gosti were tried by the Office of Ambassadors, while native ores went before a boyar designated by the tsar. They had the right to prchase votchiny, and, on certain conditions, to travel abroad. The menbers of the gostinaia and sukonnaia sotni were somewhat less generousk rewarded.

With al his wealth and privileges, however, the gost was a very different crature from the western bourgeois. He fawned on authority, in the presevation of whose absolute power he had an abiding interest. He bore heay responsibilities to the state. He was an enemy of free trade. His assocation with royal authority and support of its monopolies made him an "bject of hatred of the mass of ordinary traders. The richest businessmen in Muscovy never became spokesmen of the trading community a large. Apart rom gosti and the two 'hundreds' the only merchants favoured